• 03​ 10​ – 29​ 11​ 2014 •Pluriversale I

The Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne cordially invites you to the first edition of PLURIVERSALE, its new biannual constellation of intercultural and interdisciplinary events.

The Academy is a loose virtual collective of art practitioners from different continents and disciplines, as well as a cultural institution and a production platform in the city of Cologne. With a focus on activating an intercultural and decolonial politics of art in this city of migrants, it seeks to operate beyond the romance of multiculturalism, fostering alternative ways of thinking and acting under increasingly troubled global conditions.

Held twice a year over two months in autumn and spring, PLURIVERSALE, consisting of site-specific projects, exhibitions, concerts, discussions, film screenings, and performative symposia, proposes an alternative to the usual rhythms of biennials and their narration of unquiet times, too often universalist and relativist at once. The format’s name refers to the concept of pluriversality as used by Enrique Dussel, Walter D. Mignolo, and other thinkers from the context of postcolonial studies—the idea that one needs not a universalist but a “pluriversal” hermeneutic to deal with a world of many entangled cosmologies, the interrelation of which are regulated by a colonial power differential. In this spirit, PLURIVERSALE can be imagined as a platform that rejects a unifying narrative in favor of a critical clustering of different “worlds,” nevertheless entangled through their critical, negative, and resistant attitudes to the power differentials of a singular modernity and its universal claim.